Yesterday’s play-in game between the Twins and the Tigers was one of the greatest baseball games of all time. Game 163 is an incredibly rare occurrence and with the eyes of all baseball fans on the final regular season baseball game in the Metrodome, the epic battle between two teams playing for their season lived up to any hyperbole you could expect.
It’s too bad that Major League Baseball screwed it up.
MLB.tv has long been one of the only things that baseball does in packaging its sport better than the NFL. While fans dealt with the bad video feeds, clunky user-interface, terrible website and other idiosyncrasies, they dealt with it because they could watch their favorite teams on their laptop, an incredibly useful thing for hard core baseball fans that follow the game.
Yet baseball’s coverage of game 163 was embarrassing. Yesterday’s game wasn’t the beginning of the playoffs, it was the end of the regular season. This game counts in the regular season standings, it counts in regular season statistics, yet somehow didn’t count in the regular season coverage of baseball.
Most of us that watch these games online (like anyone living on the West Coast and trying to monitor the game from work) were forced to purchase Postseason.tv — another $9.99. I ponied up the money even though it was salt in the wounds and technically BS, because I wanted to watch the baseball game, and I’m glad that I did after following the action. But MLB.com and TBS couldn’t even give us a true broadcast of the game, instead scamming us with a half-assed product that was terrible to follow and had the production value of a high school A/V project.
Instead of letting us simply watch the broadcast like MLB.tv did all season, you were only given the TBS crew’s audio coverage, and one of eight camera feeds from the stadium. You had to manually switch from one to the other, with a huge buffer delay between the switch. You could chose to watch the game from the centerfield camera, the homeplate camera, or six different angles that stayed fixed on one thing the entire game. No replays, only limited camera movements, no graphics, none of the things that you’d assume you were paying for — after getting it for 162 other games. TBS was even dense enough to keep the microphone feeds on during commercial breaks, so you could hear first hand how awful Ron Darling and Chip Caray’s knowledge of the two teams playing in the game truly was.
“Is Mauer wearing a throwback helmet?” Darling asked at one time about the Twins MVP catcher. He’s worn the same catchers helmet for seasons, Ron.
Following the game from a stationary camera behind homeplate and being forced to listen to the absolute butcher job Caray and Darling did of the greatest regular season game in recent memory was just another example of MLB not understanding that the fan experience is one of the most important things they need to be worrying about. The slimy move of charging viewers that have spent good money all season to watch a game that should technically still be considered a part of the regular season is just one more reason I think Bud Selig is clueless.
Imagine my disdain if the Twins actually lost.
Filed under: Baseball Tagged: | Bud Selig, Chip Caray, Game 163, MLB.com, TBS, Twins vs. Tigers
